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The Evolution of Mac Gaming
Next Generation has a piece up exploring where gaming is going on Max OS X. From the article: "Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren. Sometimes that lack of support was due to hardware and input devices that weren't competitive with the PC, but the adoption of PC standards like AGP for graphics cards and USB support for 'proper' multi-button mice did away with those obstacles. But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market."
My friends always wanted to *emulate* macs for the purposes of gaming -- just the one game Escape Velocity. Heck, I *still* emulate a Mac just so I can play it from time to time (I know they have Nova for the PC, but I like the old ones better).
Sure, Mac gaming pickings have always been a bit thin, but it felt like a tighter-knit community, and they still always had the quality, just not necessarily the quantity.
Much like Slashdotters and their PSPs, the main games I play on my iBook are emulated! It makes a great portable Gameboy Advance, SNES, NES, or Sega Genesis. We all bought those old games at some point, and now you can use your new hardware as the ultimate gaming machine.
But the largest reason usually has had to do with the size of the Mac market.
What about the fact that most of the computers Apple ships come with a GeForce 5200 (iMac), Radeon 9200 (Mac Mini), or have crappy ATi laptop cards (iBook/PB) and are NOT UPGRADABLE? Not to mention the low RAM that comes standard.
Sure, they ship the G5s with good cards.. sometimes.. but I dropped $3 grand to get my DP 2.5 with a 6800 Ultra in it.
So blame the market all you want, I'm sure that's a good portion of it. However, if those MacIntels use stanard PC gaming cards, I'm willing to wager an upswing in Mac gaming.
Latewire
Umm, no. Mac gaming was alive and well throughout the 80's and in to the 90's. It wasn't until the utter PC/Wintel domination around the time that Win3.1(1993) came out that Mac gaming started to become noticably weaker. This is by no means a market that has always been weak.
AGP and USB are hardly PC standards.
Apple adopted AGP around the same time as Intel did (which was a moot point nonetheless, as A) Most 3D cards at the time were geared for D3D and not OpenGL, and B) The cards weren't compatible between platforms anyway)
USB on the other hand, was adopted AND EMBRACED lightyears earlier by apple.
And stop acting like there's always been this huge dispraity between PC and Mac games. Sure, the blockbuster games were mostly for the PC, but Apple's definitely had its share of awesome games (Escape Velocity immediately jumps to mind) -- the big distinction between the platforms was that 3d games took a long time to get off the ground for mac users.
Also remember that Mac users up until a year or two ago, typically ran MUCH OLDER hardware than their intel counterparts. Where PC users typically upgrade every 2-3 years, apple users typically don't see a need to upgrade for twice that period of time. A G4 running OS9 was laughable overkill.
OSX changed everything, making it infinitely easier for developers to support mac due to the unix core, friendly APIs, and (tada!) proper memory managment.
Even today, apple's getting some great open source games, and it would seem that the trend now is for the cool indie/OSS games to be written on OSX and then ported over to Unix/Win32. Lux comes to mind here...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The issue isn't that the good games aren't available. They eventually make it over, and they must be making money (or they wouldn't keep porting them.) The major issue that I see is that Mac users don't get the good games until at least a year after the PC release (like Neverwinter Nights, to name just one.)
I can understand not wanting to gamble on the Macintosh version before it is known if a new game will be a hit, but give me a break! Games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic were hits looooong before they were ported to the Mac.
In my opinion, the best we Mac users can hope for with mainstream games in the near future is shorter porting time with the switch to Intel processors looming.
Anbody remember Bolo? It was a Mac game invoving tanks that you could play over the internet. I remember playing it in 95. It was pretty cool. Does anyone know of a PC game prior that was net payable?
http://Lenny.com
Almost since the introduction of the Mac, Apple users have lamented the lack of game support provided to the platform as compared to its Wintel brethren.
wtf are they talking about?!?! I remember way back when... before win95. Before the pentiums. Mac gaming was where it was at. When I had my 486, I used to envy the macs and commodors and amigas.
Prince of persia is a prime example of the lack of sound and graphics support the PC world had at the time. The only decent games of taht time period were doom and wolfenstein3d.
Macs had digital sound built in. no need for that soundblaster add-in card for real sound and music over the bleeps and clicks of the PC speaker. Macs also, generally, had more VRAM, too, so they generally had much more complex graphics.
hmph.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
More great Mac games http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ Geneforge 3 is actiually pretty good. I found this companies games back when I was runing Linux. There is also freeciv, and absoute backgammon. What else would I want?
So Mac gamers are people who use their Macs for other reasons (all those reasons we endlessly hear about) and happen to want to play some games. This audience will never support more than derivative games and a few struggling indie publishers -- which is exactly the situation now.
Having said that, Apple desperately needs to fix its OpenGL problems to make game writing/porting easier.
ObligatoryNostalgiaAside: I remember playing endless games of NetTrek on my middle school's Mac Pluses. Networked gaming in 1987! And I still fire up mini vMac (yes, I have a Plus case in the basement) to play Dungeon of Doom once in a while.
Max OS X . . . to the xtreme!
Either that, or the automatic porting tools for translating DirectX calls to OpenGL will get so good that even porting DirectX games to the Mac will be easy and sacrifice little in performance. Either way, this means more games for Mac, and this will be good for Linux on x86, because a game for OSX86 will probably not be too hard to run on Linux with Transgaming translation or some Mac/Linux equivalent.
With Mac's running on Intel we may see the poor performance of Windows' OpenGL performance highlighted. Earlier on slashdot was a report on the poor performance of OpenGL on Windows due to the fact that Windows translates OpenGL to DirectX on the fly.
Could motivate M$ to improve their OpenGL support, which would be good for Apple.
They'll buy a PC to do it on. See, Mac users have the money. But I guess that won't be an issue when we get our Mactel boxes! WOOOHOOO
The Home of the Underdogs site has a *massive* list of games (810 at time of writing the article) for older systems and Classic. It's an abandonware site - you won't find Escape Velocity, since Ambrosia still parent that (fetch that from the Ambrosia website instead) but you'll find a heck of a lot of other cool stuff. And you'll get some startling revelations such as, for example, a game like Populous 2 - granted not hugely complicated, but there's a heck of a lot of stuff in there - takes a mere 2.6MB of space, which compresses to 1.6MB. Most items are bigger than that these days. The save file is a whopping 238 bytes. Wow.
Anyway, a good list of games that bring back memories. Enjoy!
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
i love gaming, it's fun, and its a great thing to do with friends, however- are mac gamers really that crippled? I mean, every fps shooter is basically multiplayer deathmatch, then single player shoot-em-up with a similar storyline to the rest of them. I play starcraft, unreal tournament 2004, call of duty, and doom 3. all on a mac. they run great and its alll you need. starcraft, well is just starcraft, the legendary strategy game from the late 90's, call of duty, ut2k4, and d3 are all great fps shooters. its all you really need. i mean, sure, it cant play half life 2, but do you really need it? is it really that great? what is so different about it than call of duty or doom 3? just my two cents.
I used to do Mac game development - I did the ports of a couple of the larger commercial titles on the Mac in 2001-2002.
It generally paid very poorly, and support from Apple was iffy.
If I was to do a financial break down of units sold vs what the average Mac development company got paid for a port, it was probably along the lines of about $1 per unit sold. 50,000 units sold was a big hit (not often achieved; 20,000 was more realistic), and it was not unusual for a game to take an engineer 6 to 12 months to complete.
One of the more prominent commercial Mac game publishers tried to drive down the cost of development by using the bids of wanna-be developers with no experience to drive down the bids of the experienced companies.
I've since moved on to console work at a major publisher/developer, and for once enjoy job security, great working conditions, and good pay (steady pay, at that).
Oh GOD NO! PLEASE NOOOO!!!!
I can't recall the number of hours that I wasted playing that. I could have stopped whenever, but I just had to keep playing to afford the Kestrel.
I had almost gotten over my addiction, and I had even completely forgotten about the game, UNTIL YOU JUST MENTIONED IT!
BASTARD!
However, Microsoft has definitely been discouraging use of OpenGL on Windows for quite a while, and while I don't believe Microsoft is actually artificially degrading OpenGL performance in any way on their current operating systems, this effort probably has led to the hardware vendors devoting less time and energy to developing OpenGL drivers.
John Carmack has always acted as a force keeping OpenGL alive on the PC by coding his games (and thus also the games that use his engine) for OpenGL instead of Direct3D; however, the current reports are that id is now doing dual Xbox360/PC development of their next-generation engine. Unless Microsoft is releasing an OpenGL library for Xbox360 (highly unlikely), this probably means that he is switching over to D3D.
Since Apple tends to ship their consumer machines with non-upgradeable, lower-end 3D cards, any 3D game on the Mac is likely to be GPU-limited anyways, so using an OpenGL-to-DirectX conversion library may not be that much of a performance hit.
With Mac x86 on the horizon I definitly see someone porting wine or Transgaming selling cedega for Mac x86. I wouldnt be surprised if it was included in the Mac x86 release, its Applest best way to best way to gain market share from M$.
Believe it or not, one of the big things that made me drool for a mac was Mechwarrior II. A special version was written for the mac to take advantage of some badass video card (Rave I think it was called). I saw it on my friends computer, thought about my crappy DOS-version graphics, and said "I MUST HAVE ONE!". It was beautiful. 10 years ago, if a game publisher wanted to, they could make a mac version that would blow the DOS/Win95 version out of the water. I imagine it stopped paying off to do so.
Obviously its been many years since then. I've never been a big gamer (even before switching to the mac), and what games I do play I play on my PS2 or one of my 4 generations of Nintendo systems.
For nostalgia's sake, I did find a copy of that old version of Mechwarrior and booted it up in classic. Still stunning!
To those interested in developing games for Mac, you should stop by the iDevGames forum sometime ;)
Another similar site (which many of the iDevGames members also visit) is CreateMacGames.org.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
Max OS X? >Must upgrade!
Check out 'N' a great flash game. The proble with flash is reusability of the modules, and the hackability of it.
Looking at teagames.com and http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/jblog Java quake 3 map renderer (with rail gun) that runs at ~89fps on my stock dell POShit.
Despite diverging proprietary systems, the dominance of flash and java in web and mobile gaming will ultimately (as technology grows) give us cross platform gaming. If Java can do cross platform quake 3 now, in 3 years will Java do cross platform Doom3 or Offset engine?
Cross platform - its what you want!
Play N today, it is supeerrrr333t, and they are putting out tutorials as their prime objective.
Teagames hasn't tutorials yet, if you want, nag them to put some tutorials out!
Thats all!
Tod the guy playing slashdot and reading flash games... switch that... while getting paid!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
This site has a few goodies to try out.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
If gaming could return to the Mac, I could go without buying another Windows PC, EVER! Of course, I do more console gaming and we've already got Unreal Tournament GOTY running on Debian at work. What else could I ask for?
Am I the only one that thinks gaming is going nowhere on the Mac platform?
The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small.. If gaming is important to you, you probably wouldn't choose a Mac as your platform.
With the console game platforms becoming even more powerful, I think more people in general will use them for all their gaming needs, and not use PC's (which may be a good thing for Apple, it makes PC gaming less relevant).
Of course, there will always be a handful of games for the Mac. But, I see no reason why that will change in the near future, regardless of PowerPC vs x86, OpenGL vs DirectX, etc.
Does anyone Remember the fake "Switch" ad that highlighted the dearth of games on the Mac? I'm a huge Mac fanatic, but I laughed my ass off when I saw that ad. http://www.ugo.com/channels/games/features/switch/ media/switch.mov
Those two words, to me represent the biggest tragedy for the Mac gaming world. Games like Myth and Marathon and their sequels were like Doom and Warcraft for people with brains. These guys always had stuff that was way ahead of other game makers and they always developed for the Mac first. Halo was even announced when they were still a Mac-developing company (based in Chicago, I think) if I remember correctly. When I heard the news that Bungie had been bought by none other than MS, moved HQ to Redmond and was going to release Halo as the flagship Xbox game I... well, I really can't even talk about my reaction, I still get a little too choked up. The last brilliant gasp as a Mac-developing company was Oni, which was very late and lacked the mult-player features that it was supposed to have, but it was still an excellent game. Does anybody know what happened exactly? That is, did MS just have so much money that the Bungie guys couldn't say "no" or were they in financial trouble already? As I mentioned above, they seemed to be getting way behind schedule in their development, so it seems plausible that they were having money problems.
I'm just sayin'.
buy an Xbox. Seriously, for the money it would take to get a mac gaming PC, you can easily buy a lower end mac, an Xbox and a bunch of games. Heck, for the money I'd blow on a mac gaming pc I could buy a mac mini and a Windows gaming PC (at least one that'd play Half-Life 2 and Doom 3)
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mac gaming will probably takeoff when it hits intel cause:
a) the hardware will be cheaper and more accessable and of equivalent power.
b) There will be less programming challenges in porting games.
c) More people will buy macs when they move to intel, again because they will be cheaper and more powerful.
The video card issue I think is really holding back macs.
when gaming became an industry. Microsoft, and this pains me to say this, were REALLY on the ball when they started to develop DirectX. OK, the first few versions were baaaad, but it proved to developers that windows wanted to concidered a serious contender when it came to games.
I know 3D graphics don't automagically make games better, but it does mean that people are prepared to pay more money because they are buying an experience, not a game. I bought a Voodoo 2 in 1997. Everyone thought I was mad, even I didn't fully understand what it would do for the game, all I thought it did was give me more FPS (this was important as I was only getting 16 FPS in Quake 2). It was like see the difference between a paint by numbers Mona Lisa and the real thing - I was hooked. Now thats not a great example, as Quake 2 used glide, but if I hadn't bought that card for Quake, I would never have bought Half-life, Deus-Ex or probably my X-Box.
The real point was that all of a sudden my PC became my console. Even though I used my PC for coursework etc, that was just something it did, what I needed it for was games. It was the other way around with Macs, and still is.
I gave up on PCs two years ago - mainly because I got bored of FPS not progressing, and the 6 monthly upgrade cycle was killing my pocket - and getting me into trouble. All I really needed was a computer to work on, and a console to play on.
Clearly there will always be a market for PC games, but I would expect it to shrink. If your spending $1500 on a new computer, then your spending $1100 on a games machine, and $400 on a work computer. That wasn't the case 5 years ago, it was far more like $1500 for a new computer, and you need every ounce of power just to get Office working properly. This means the even if windows continues to dominate, the percentage of high-end PC games is going start to shrink very quickly - and the PC games market with it. For that reason I don't think Macs will ever be a serious game platform.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
When Captain Hector comes by like that, you always want to be sure he hasn't drained half your life savings. And jump to hyperspace right away.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
would you want to (right from the games release) limit your product to only a small percentage of people? I'm not sure what the number of Windows machines is compared to Macs, but i know there is way more windows machines. Basically just developing for the Mac limits your profit...also those l33t gamerz just dont use Macs. hah
A big problem: although there were great 80's Mac games, Apple did not support game developers and publishers because Macs are for "serious" and "professional" purposes such as office and school use, film, art, graphics, music. Macs are for professionals who make content for the entertainment industry, NOT for frivolous entertainment such as games. Then cheap dual processor wintel boxes became weapons of choice for 3D game artists. Microsoft brass and staff saw opportunity in games and fostered the industry. Apple brass didn't want their cute designer Macs to be perceived as toys, hence they refused to support games.
Avid and hardcore gamers in the market for a computer will buy Wintel, not Apple because you can't play most games on a Mac. I won't consider buying a Mac until all games are supported.
Not enough market share to justify development cost.
Just business, that's all.
I personally believe that PC users will start to feel like Mac users have for the last ten years. They'll be looking at consoles, and pining over the latest, greatest games, and wondering why it takes a year for the PC version to come out, if it comes out at all.
Oh, wait a minute. They won't be pining, because a lot of them also own consoles.
Consoles are the future for gaming. Game development houses will spend their effort targeting them. It's already happening, because of the massive market, and lower development and support costs due to standardised hardware and software. Since a really high percentage of PC owners also own a console, porting console games to PCs will be uneconomic.
Of course, there will always be the less mainstream games that will be PC only (perhaps because they need things that consoles don't supply, or they're targeting people who don't own consoles), but the really big budget games will be console first, or more likely, console only.
Marathon was around back then, and it kicked ass! My friend's family had 4 macs and had them all networked together. We used to get together every day after school and play the shit out of Marathon (a great game by the company which later made the Halo games).
I've had Macs forever, since my father wouldn't allow anything in the house. (God bless him for that, hehe...)
I also lamented the world of Mac games, but here are some that I played and enjoyed thoroughly. Some, true, were ports to Mac, but they still qualify (unlike Half-Life, which I really wish had been ported). Let's see how many of you recall these titles...
Space Rogue - This was one of the earlier color games that sticks out in my mind. This was something along the lines of what Escape Velocity: Nova is today, with one notable exception (graphics aren't being discussed for obvious reasons) -- The combat screen wasn't a top-down third-person perspective; it was first-person, much along the lines of old SpectreVR, and you could operate in all three dimensions. All the while you hauled cargo (I could never get the cargo on Basruti...) and killed pirates, etc. Fantastic game.
Spaceship Warlock - Another color game, one of the first CD games that I rememeber for the Mac (ran on Pop's 4x CD drive - lol). Another pirate adventure starting you out in the brig of the Warlock. It's great fun.
Cosmic Osmo - I imagine there was probably one person out there who just freaked out at the mention of this game. Remember Hypercard (of course you do, this is the Mac forum...)? It was a hypercard based video game and it was insanely fun. I barely even remember anything about playing it but I remember playing it often. It was something of a puzzle-adventure; think Myst, but filtered for 99.9% of graphics and story. It was just entertaining.
Bolo - Tanks. Destruction. Networking. I don't know how old this one is/was, but it's one I miss. Bolo was a -great- game.
Spectre VR - Already mentioned, of course. LOVED it.
Also consider...
Dark Castle
Beyond Dark Castle
Scarab of Ra
The Colony
Apologies if any of these were already posted, but I love games; always found games to play on the old Macs.
See, the problem wasn't the -lack- of Mac games, it's that every Mac gamer had 100 friends with PC games... they felt left out. IMO, anyway.
... I can't believe this name wasn't already taken!!!